Is Inclusion the Answer?

Is Inclusion the Answer?

Juan Navedo Inquiry Report “Is Inclusion the Answer?” IDS 2013.001 Nicole Ramirez 12/1/2008 What exactly is inclusion? Inclusion classrooms are the opposite of what has been the traditional education system globally, including the United States of America, in which children who are labeled as special needs were taught separately from the “normal” children in an effort to either give them to additional support they needed or babysit them and keep them secluded from the “normal” children so they would not be a distraction to their own learning. This separation resembles too closely to the history of the segregation of schools in America and the idea that the color of a person’s skin and they way that they brought up determined their learning capacity. The standard of education in today’s schools no longer segregates students based on their race, creed, or religion, but it has still managed to segregate student based on their physical and mental abilities. With inclusion in schools, the attempt has been made to eliminate this type of discrimination and segregation by placing these students, who were previously mandated to separate classroom for special education, into the classrooms with every other student which is now referred to as general education (Rayner 2007). With the acceptance of the inclusion method,comes the challenge of how to incorporate high quality special education into the general public classroom amidst the spotlight of accountability and high stakes testing of the American educational system. Educators, today, are required to strengthen the academic development and expectation for children with disabilities and are held more accountable then they were historically, and are also expected to close the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged and high- and low-performing students so that no child is left behind (Smith 2005, p. 269). Many general education teachers have had reservations as to the emergence of inclusion classrooms, many of the...

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